Thursday, August 30, 2007

Insomnia

The good thing about writing every day is that it keeps my script in my head, always.

That's been a problem, since I read so much other stuff that my writing hasn't always been able to stake out its patch of land. My brain is like Woodstock, without the topless girls.

Okay, maybe there are topless girls.

The bad thing about writing every day is that it keeps my script in my head, always.

I found myself wide awake this morning at 4:30 AM, after a choppy five hours of sleep. Lying there, thinking about my script despite myself, I came to a realization about a big scene near the ending.

Damn it. Up I got, at around 5 AM.

I'm not a morning person, but I managed to sit at the table downstairs, make some notes in longhand for about 20 minutes, then I sat at the laptop and wrote for a couple of hours.

And -- at least in my half-awake state -- it feels like I nailed the sequence I wrote. So maybe this sleep thing is overrated.

18 straight days, screenwriting for at least an hour. Boo-yah.

Tomorrow I'm going to write one final sequence of this, my low-budget thriller (not the actual climax, because I wrote that last week, just for the hell of it) and then I'll have a fairly unrough rough draft done.

Which feels nice, except it looks like it's going to clock in at about 83 pages, which -- despite purposely being the lean, tight script I want it to be -- is still way too short. Anything under 90+ pages just looks odd.

I'm not going to try to force in extra pages, but it's nice to know I have the room if I come up with a good sequence that fits, and my structure is flexible enough to allow this. When I first started writing, my drafts would come in around 140 pages; this is better.

Worse comes to worse, I'll just add an extra space before all the scene headings, and open the top and bottom margins just a little more. Sneak up to 90 that way -- but only if the script clicks like it is now.

After tomorrow, I'll toss it to the side for a week or two, and let it settle, so I can read it fresh.

Otherwise, congrats to Brett, who made the Nicholl semis with his script. It's a good, good thing. But here's hoping you make the finals, and don't get stuck in the dead zone that the semis represented for me...

I made notes with a friend on a script that we wanted to write together last year, that maybe it's time to rededicate ourselves to, because it's commercial as hell. I printed out all the notes we made, and they need to be gone through, and sorted out, and brainstormed.

If I dedicate a focused hour (at minimum) a day -- at least -- to brainstorming and creating pages of notes on a screenwriting project, that counts in my book.

I still have several half-completed projects that I can also jump back into, as well as ideas demanding my attention. What to write was never a problem, and still isn't :-)

Keep rockin' Scott. I'm glad to hear your writing is going so well. And you're so right about eyeing other project while writing your current work. That's solid advice that's echoed by MANY other pros in Karl Igleasias' "The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters." I keep what I call a "docket" file which has a littany of varrious stories that are in varrious stages of being. I add to the docket from time-to-time, but don't dwell on it to heavily.

Congradulations Brett! Making the Nicholls' semi-finals is SO cool. Hopefully Brett will win, and get his script made into a moive or making some advances with other scripts he's written.

LOVE hearing about other author's sucesses. Thanks for the information, Scott.